“I doubt that human perception is capable of nonfiction,” Dodie Bellamy writes in her new collection, “When the Sick Rule the World,” which could be described as (mostly) nonfiction that refuses to ascribe to fixed ideas about truth. Bellamy revels in the contradictions of her own perceptions, highlighting the gaps until they form their own structure. Rejecting linear narrative as a dishonest method, Bellamy favors a meandering prose that moves forward and backward at once, shaking the present out of stasis.

“When the Sick Rule the World” is about relationships and texts. “The essay is a form I’ve always found oppressive,” Bellamy writes, in the middle of an essay, turning the form inside out. If writing about writing can be dull and unobtrusive, Bellamy takes it to the next level — writing about writing about writing — and makes it enthralling. “Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it,” she incants.

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While Bellamy repeatedly describes herself as lacking in charisma, what comes through in her writing is an excess of feeling stumbling toward hope. “Never again would I experience an arts community whose mandate was inclusivity,” Bellamy says of her involvement with the Feminist Writers’ Guild in the Bay Area in the late 1970s, leaving us to wonder what she’s experienced since.

“I have the urge to write down everything, to embalm the trivial against the onrush of death,” Bellamy admits — it’s this urge that allows for prose that circles back on itself until it breaks open.

“Home is an instinct, a yearning that has never, ever been satisfied, that can never be eradicated,” Bellamy realizes, while watching “E.T.” in her childhood home with her dying mother, but this applies equally to her adopted home of San Francisco, where she has lived since the late-’70s. “In the Shadow of Twitter Towers,” the final piece in “When the Sick Rule the World,” examines the changes in Bellamy’s South of Market “micro-neighborhood” since the 2012 arrival of Twitter headquarters two blocks from the apartment she’s shared since 1990. What Bellamy describes is not just a neighborhood under attack by gentrification, poverty and desperation, but a self on the verge of implosion.

“I’m outside both ends of the socioeconomic ladder, for now,” Bellamy notes, and perhaps it’s this in-between space that allows for a fearless honesty. Bellamy uses Google searches, quotes from writers both living and dead, Yelp reviews and e-mails from an incensed “condoite” across the street from her to paste together a portrait of a fractured neighborhood and a fracturing self.

“The real enemy is always unseen, I think, the real enemy hides in systems too vast to understand — capitalism, entitlement, dehumanization, greed. Over Sauvignon Blanc and cheese, I tell Ed and his friend Pat Sawzik about the changes happening in San Francisco, our fears of eviction. Pat smiles broadly and suggests I propose a writing workshop for Twitter employees.”

In deadpan satire, Bellamy outlines a proposal for the “Tech Heart Institute,” where, for a salary of $100,000 per year and the purchase of her building, she would help Twitter employees to reconnect with their bodies. But Bellamy sometimes seems as wary of political radicalism as the empty slogans of “techrification,” as afraid of the homeless people in her neighborhood as she is their demise.

“To deny one’s lens is corrupt. Immoral even,” Bellamy declares. Her value system demands that she reveal all contradictions. She calls the cops to help a guy who regularly sits screaming outside, even though she knows they will not offer aid. She praises the offerings in the food court of the Twitter building and fearfully negotiates the street at night to get Choo Chee Salmon from a Thai restaurant. “There is no narrative,” she writes.

And yet, from the depths of the mundane, Bellamy provides revelation. Sometimes it’s as subtle as a sidewalk installation made of white pieces of trash. “Life is not a movie. I can stop and stare, but I cannot pause, cannot rewind.” It’s Bellamy’s refusal to pause that makes “When the Sick Rule the World” frenetic with experience, jarring and wild in its intimacy.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is most recently the author of “The End of San Francisco.” E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com